Study Problems

There's all kinds of things I find fascinating, and many of them remain so in spite of my best efforts to study and analyze them to death.

What I've discovered is, it's damn near impossible for me to enjoy them the way I did at first. Physicists will tell us that you can measure anything without affecting it, but there's a lot less talk about how you change everything just be learning more about it, even without getting embroiled in conversations about the nature of change.

Speaking of which, I'm one of those who don't usually believe in change. It's sloppy language as far as I'm concerned since, for example, if I change my clothes chances are none of the original clothes are still being worn. I've taken them off and replaced them with an entirely new set of clothes and to my way of thinking, unless something stays constant, it's senseless to talk of it changing. I can change my hair, sure, since what I have left of it is reshaped when I change it, and it can be argued that water changes to ice in the freezer, but in most cases I get rid of the old stuff and replace it with completely new crap.

When I say I change the chair in my computer room what I'm really saying is I moved the old and put a new one in its place. There's no "chair" that underwent any change at all.

But, as usual, that's not the point.

I noticed this changing of subject first, I think, in literature and movies. I, like most everyone else, like movies, but when I began studying them I began seeing them in a whole new light. My original, innocent, and ignorant appreciation was lost when I began understanding the craft and could see how plot elements were added to aid in making up the story. It didn't take me all that long to see how a character was introduced simply to move the plot along, and when I began seeing movies and books this way, a lot of the magic disappeared.

Instead of simply enjoying the work, I found my appreciation for it changed, much like I might if I saw 137 magicians all performing a trick that I knew how to do. The first magician would surprise and astonish me, but once I learned how the trick was done, my appreciation of it would depend more on how it was performed than on what it was.

Years ago I read a good book Zen Mind, Begineer's Mind by some Suzuki fellow that talked about this sort of thing at length. I guess it was a Zen instruction book, but his point was that it's downright difficult to keep our sense of wonder if we let our knowledge get in the way. His metaphor, if I remember correctly, was that you can't add anything to a full glass and to get away from that, you have to try to approach things as if you are experiencing them for the first time. If you don't, and pile all your prejudices, familiarity, and understanding onto something, you'll most likely miss quite a bit.

I'm not sure I have any point here other than to note that the more I learn about anything, the more it changes. Things usually change so much that I hesitate to call them by the same name, but there's only so many nouns in English and I usually use them up during my introduction to something. The good news, I guess, is that this sort of change has been a constant since Adam, and just goes to prove that while we can't step twice in the same river, we keep the river's name the same as it stops being a plaything and becomes an example of gravity, climate, and biology.

The biggest downside is that our experts have forgotten their initial joy and wonder and what they can teach us is usually pretty far removed from what we see at first. It's the nature of the breast, I suppose, but it's still a shame that we go so quickly from tickled pink to jaded and cynical.